Hillary examined her fingernails. Mine are bitten to the quick—hers are lovely, long, and polished. Hillary looked at Emily and Emily looked at her desk, and Hillary said, “I think our vacation plans are somewhat different this year, Jennie. Just Emily and I are going.”
She said it out loud.
The whole room heard.
And all the people who usually watch Paul Classified, picking up clues, watched me. I don’t know what they saw. I wasn’t even inside my body again for hours: I was just this thing sitting upright, hanging onto the sobs, waiting for the day to end.
But my days never end.
And I even had to ride home with them. I thought I would crumble, like a stale cookie. We didn’t exchange a single sentence.
I got out, they drove on, Emily got out, and from the doorway Em’s mother said, “Darling. Come give me a hug.”
I went inside and my mother met me at the door, crying, “Dunstan! Dunstan! Tell me what you did today, dear!”
What if I didn’t do anything today?
What if I just existed, like Hillary and Emily?
What would my mother do?
Would she still love me?
I hid my tears. “You can yell Dunstan until your throat is raw, Mother, and I’m going to wait until you say Jennie.”
“But Jennie is so common,” she said fretfully. “How was I to know every third girl in the school system would be named Jennie?”
“Mother, Dunstan sounds like a dead king in Shakespeare.”
“It’s your middle name. It has character.”
“It’ll have to have character without me,” I said. I pushed past her into the house, almost flinging my books at the wall. I could just see myself telling Hillary and Emily they have to call me Dunstan.
“But Dunstan Quint sounds so exciting!” cried my mother. “It’ll look so successful when the pageant is published.” She dragged me into the dining room. The entire room is me: from my kindergarten crayon pictures framed in red to my junior-high piano recital programs framed in a tailored black. She and Daddy had framed the first page of my pageant manuscript. The frame was so massive, so ornate, so gold—you’d think it was Beethoven up there over the fireplace, not my little Christmas piece.
“It’s nice,” I managed.
She told me I was tired and I would feel better after dinner.
I doubted that a hot meal would bring back a friendship.
The dining-room table is always beautifully set. Mother likes a formal meal. Our house was photographed once in House Beautiful. I was ten, and Mother dressed me in a long colonial gown with a starched white apron and a tiny white cap and perched me in the antique chairs like a prop that breathed.
I gave Daddy a kiss, and sat down. We said grace together, as we always do, and as she always does, Mother smiled and said proudly, “Such a nice family.”
As if we were a trophy.
A display case of nice family.
“Jennie, darling, are you upset about something?” My mother was mystified. What on earth would her Jennie have to be upset about?
I took the plunge. “My friendship with Hillary and Emily is sort of petering out,” I said, which was the understatement of the year.
“We all saw it coming, Jennie,” my father said. He took some chicken and passed the gravy. “Hillary and Emily are fine girls, but average. You’re just not going to be associating with that kind of girl as you grow up. I know you feel sad about The Awesome Threesome, but the truth is, Hill and Em would just hold you back.”
Life is good.
No friends to hold me back.
What a treat.
“Emily must be such a disappointment to Margaret,” said my mother. “I mean, Em is a happy child, and of course that’s greatly to be admired, but one always hopes one’s child will be an achiever. Em simply exists.”
“Mrs. Weinstein is very proud of Emily,” I said stiffly.
“I don’t know why. Name one thing Em has accomplished since she started high school.”
Accomplished, I thought.
“See? You can’t think of a thing.” Mother smiled into her crystal goblet as if it foretold our lives. “Emily probably will end up going to the University of Connecticut. Hillary may not even get in there.”
“Mother, UConn is a perfectly good school.”
“Certainly. For ordinary people.”
I pictured Paul Classified throwing the table at those boys. I had a terrible fierce desire to throw the table at my mother. In my lap I clung to my napkin. I forced myself to finish chewing and swallow and have a sip of water. “I was talking to Miss Clinton today about my next musical,” I said. I didn’t want to talk music. I wanted to talk Hillary and Emily, friends and losses. But my parents were glad that I’m losing Hill and Em. They didn’t care if I didn’t have a single friend!
Daddy is lean and gray and tired from the commute to New York. The family rule is to talk about pleasant things. What I do every day is always a pleasant thing to Daddy. I don’t know much about what he does. He dislikes talking about his own work. “Have you written much of the dialogue yet?” he asked.
“I have the title in mind. But I don’t have much experience with dialogue, Daddy.”
“Not a whole lot of dialogue you can throw into a Christmas pageant,” agreed Daddy. “After you’ve said ‘no room at the inn’ you’ve about finished up the speeches.”
I had Thanksgiving in mind.
I’d been reading diaries of Puritans and Pilgrims. The sentence that stuck in my head was, “Ye season, it was winter.”
How cold it felt. How on the edge of that terrible wilderness! How hungry and bleak and dark. Ye Season It Was Winter. I could feel them all, in their shabby wraps, huddled around inadequate fires in drafty huts, trying to believe they would survive. Ye Season It Was Winter.
Over the summer, writing the pageant, I was full of enthusiasm. While Hillary was in Switzerland and Emily was making Happy Meals, I was filled with excitement, as if I were a thermos, and all the cups were music.
Now the thermos is empty. Emily and Hillary are just mad at me for not telling them what I was doing on the pageant. But if I had told them, they would have been even madder! Hill would have said, “You can’t sew seven kings’ costumes!” and Emily would have said, “A whole musical? Get out of town. You can’t do all that.”
But I can do it!
And if I can do it once, I can do it twice!
But I can’t get excited over anything without friends.
I guess that’s why I’m clinging to my crush on Paul Classified. I can pretend to this diary that at least he’s my friend.
“Not my favorite meal, dear,” Daddy said to Mother. “I know Jennie likes chicken and biscuits, but why don’t you make that wonderful shrimp-stuffed eggplant you served the Farrells last month?”
“Oh, yes! The New York Times Cookbook. Yes, and perhaps we’ll ask the Benjamins to dinner. I think they could be of considerable assistance in Jennie’s career.”
I hate eggplant. I hate shrimp. I don’t much like the Benjamins, either. And I don’t want a career. I want friends.
Daddy was beaming. “While girls like Hillary and Emily are busy trying on clothes at Bloomingdale’s, you, my dear, are becoming a serious composer.”
Serious composer. It sounds so sober. Full of frowns and silence.
“I can hardly believe your junior year is half over, Jennie,” said my father. “Time to start thinking of colleges. With your record you can go anywhere. Harvard if you want academics. Juilliard if you want music only.”
We sat at the table—another trio—as if they thought the trio of Quints could replace the trio of Emily, Hill, and Jennie. Above us, framed in gold, hung the first page of my pageant orchestration: black notes rushing across the staff, a row of treble clefs where I practiced the shape of them, and margin notes where Miss Clinton helped me.
Neither my mother nor my father looked at me.
Their eyes were glu
ed to the manuscript.
“I feel as if we’ve gone on safari,” my father said, laughing, turning at last to smile at me.
“Safari?” I repeated. My father is the least likely person in Connecticut to go on a safari. He is strictly New York City.
“As if we went to Africa and bagged a great specimen,” he said, beaming. “We bagged a daughter who comes in first.”
I dedicate myself to having no profile at all and I end up with a profile so high that people follow me when I drive off!
—— —— —— —— Jared followed me again.
I’ll draw lines instead of writing the four-letter words. Saying those words is like any other kind of talking: I’m afraid once I begin, I’ll never stop. How would it be to swear for all eternity?
We got to a red light, and I leaped out of my car and ran back past three other cars and ripped open the driver’s door of his shiny red Porsche. I hung onto the handle so I wouldn’t rip open the shiny blue ski jacket he was wearing. “Where do you get off?” I screamed at him. “I do not exist in order to put excitement into your little yuppie life!” But I didn’t stay for an answer. The light turned green, I raced back to my car, drove off about a hundred miles an hour, and never saw the Porsche again.
I had to quit the factory job. Mom can’t make it without me home after school. I’d like to know how we’re both going to make it unless one of us is earning money.
Jealousy hurts me, because I’m the one who is bad enough to feel it, but today I saw my own jealousy cutting Jennie.
She actually begged us to be her friends.
We had reached Hillary’s car and were on the way home via Bloomingdale’s, because Hill had some last-minute shopping. She forgot her cousins. We were thinking about scarves, because you can always use a scarf, but scarves are boring—who wants to open a package and find yet another scarf?
And Jennie came running across the parking lot and jumped into the back seat.
We just sat in the front without talking to her.
“May I have a ride home?” she asked.
Hill looked at her in the rearview mirror. “We aren’t going straight home, Jennie.”
Jennie was nervous. She could compose a whole musical, but she couldn’t be our friend, and she knew it. “Oh. Where are you going?”
I knew we were going to be mean. I could feel it, and I didn’t even stop. I wanted to be mean, just the way she wants to show off and be better than anybody else. Hillary said, “What business is it of yours, Jennie? The Awesome Threesome doesn’t exist anymore, you know, and you can’t just go jumping into other people’s cars as if you owned them.”
Even I gasped at that. But I didn’t say anything nice, either.
Jennie screamed, “What do you want of me? Do you want me to be stupid? Okay, I’ll fail a class. Do you want me to be ugly? Okay, I’ll stop washing my hair. Do you want me to be boring? Okay, I’ll never say an interesting sentence again! Will you like me then?”
I was stone.
Hill was ice.
Jennie was raw, bleeding flesh.
But stone and ice don’t respond, and Hill and I didn’t respond to Jennie, and Jennie, sobbing, leaped out of the car and slammed the door and ran back to the high school.
Half of me thought, Good, we hurt her.
And the other half of me thought, Oh my God, we hurt her!
Now the guys are really fascinated. Anybody who’ll fight back a half dozen of them, and then win a round with Dr. Sykes—it must be some secret he’s protecting.
I want to pound their faces in.
The CIA. Spies.
Give me a break. Do they think I like living like this? Do they think I want secrets in my life? I hate this! I want my life normal and boring and routine like other people’s.
And if I tell them the “secret” (secret? It’s my life, not a secret!) they’d be disappointed. They want it to be romantic.
Romantic’s a funny word. It means adventure, and thrills, and heart-stopping journeys: fast cars and small planes and wild beasts: spies and cold wars, dead bodies and codes.
My life?
Hah.
My life is a sister I could kill.
My life is a mother who has collapsed. I get to be the one who will put her in an institution. That should be romantic, huh?
Okay, okay. Take a deep breath. One more day until vacation.
It won’t be a vacation for me. Just no school. Home all day long? How am I going to make it?
Lonely has a temperature.
Cold.
Paul Classified doesn’t even look at me now.
It hurts so much!
I feel as if it’s a lesson from God. I thought I could have everything, so God picked out something I can’t have, and every minute of every day, He puts Paul in front of me so I have to gaze at what I can’t have.
The Awesome Threesome is gone. Now there is a twosome. Emily and Hillary. I think it’s still awesome. Friendship itself is awesome. Wonderful—miraculous—to be wanted for your company.
Nobody wants mine, and I’m shedding some pretty awesome tears about it, too. But I have no awesome solutions. I have no solutions at all.
Don’t tell, Paul begged me.
We’re standing there at the emergency room door and he takes my hand—like he’s my subject, I’m his lord—and pleads with me. “Don’t tell, Emily.” I try to reason with him. I try to explain that people can help, that he’ll do better, feel better, end up better, if people know.
But he’s standing there: his 170 pounds, his six feet, his broad shoulders, his thick dark hair, his fingers twice as wide as mine—and he’s fragile. He could break.
So I promise.
“I won’t tell,” I whisper back.
He leans against the wall, kind of puffing out his breath in little gasps, as if he’d just run a great distance.
I said, “But what will you do? You can’t live alone.”
“Easier than living together,” said Paul shortly.
He looked at me with terrible tension—all the wires in him stretched taut—and I promised again not to tell.
I’m not even writing it down. I just realized that a diary is very exposed. You may think there is privacy in one, but there isn’t, and now it’s not my life I’m talking about—it’s Paul’s.
If I am admired as one who achieves, Ansley and Jared are admired simply because they exist. To go to their parties is to have a front-row seat in the auditorium of life.
“You’re coming to my New Year’s party, of course,” said Jared. He put his arm around me. I like affection as much as the next girl, but Jared’s embrace never means affection; it’s just part of his stance, as if we’re about to be photographed.
But oh, how glad I was to be invited. I, Jennie Quint, top of the mountain, top of the pile, cream of the crop—I almost wept because someone wanted my company.
“Bring a date,” said Jared. “Who are you going out with right now, Jennie?”
Nobody. But I want to be with Paul Classified. Paul’s arms around me, Paul’s kiss on my lips. I would have to catch him in class. If only there were a time and a place when I could talk privately to Paul. But P.C. is crafty: he can protect his secrets best in a crowd.
Ansley sauntered down the hall toward us. Ansley has a wonderful walk: she never hurries and yet she always gets places faster than anybody else. I’ve tried a hundred times to imitate that walk and can’t. Ansley tossed her hair: thick pale yellow hair. Ansley had it cut so that it would fall over her left eye, and Ansley could fling it back. Slowly, it would slither down over the eye again. Very effective. Sexy.
“Coming to our party, darling?” said Ansley.
You have to live in a certain place and your parents have to have a certain income to be Ansley’s darling. Jared never calls anybody “darling.” Except maybe himself. “You inviting Hill and Emily?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so. Hill and Em just aren’t very exciting, you know what I mea
n?”
I came to their defense as if there were still an Awesome Threesome. “So what’s your idea of excitement? All you ever do is buy clothes, Ansley. Is excitement the January sales?”
But Ansley just laughed.
Fifth period, incredibly, I managed to be alone with Paul Classified. He actually agreed to abandon language lab for the library. Sitting in one of the carrels, we were supposedly working on German together. German poets of the nineteenth century. In German. I can only assume I signed up for this course when I was insane. Paul, in fact, was working on his German. I was working on Paul. “Ansley and Jared are giving a party,” I said casually.
Paul Classified’s face moved slightly: not really a smile, but maybe it was meant to be. “I forget sometimes you live in the Yuppie Yard with all that crowd. You’re so different from them, Jennie.” He shook his head, as though the difference were so vast you would have to shade your eyes in the sun to see across the gap.
“I never heard anybody call it the Yuppie Yard before.”
Paul was amazed. “That’s the nickname for all those ritzy little lanes off Talcott Hill,” he said.
“Where do you live, anyhow?”
“Downtown.” He flipped through the index in the German book without looking anything up. “The pageant went well, Jennie. I was impressed.”
I forgave him for not telling where he lived. “What night did you come?”
The pageant ran three nights. Standing ovations all three nights. Talk of Young Composer of the Year Award. Talk of scholarships to a conservatory like Juilliard, or having the music published.
But no talk with Emily or Hillary.
There was a momentary pause. Hardly unusual for Paul. But the answer—oh, the answer! That was unusual. “All three nights,” he said. He was not looking at me. He was staring into the German book index. Paul drew in a deep breath, and his fingers tightened on his pencil. Paul who never fidgeted bit his lips and wet them with his tongue and did not look my way.
All three nights? Paul Classified, who did not play sports, did not go to assemblies, did not attend concerts, did not go to parties—Paul went all three nights to my Christmas pageant? Plus the dress rehearsal?